Company call centers or online support forums put customers in contact with company agents for customer service, for example, to provide technical support, sell products or schedule appointments. Customers are typically ordered in a queue and served on a first come first serve basis. Each customer is typically teamed up with or connected with the next available agent from a pool of agents in order to optimize service and provide the fastest agent response time. However, the customer may be matched with a new agent each time the customer contacts a support center. Such variation in agents may be frustrating for customers who may have to repeat information for each new agent and may also be inefficient for the agents who may have to be updated on issues already resolved by previous agents.
Further variability may be introduced when customers use multiple different channels of communication, such as the Internet and call centers, for customer service. For example, customers often shop online (using one channel of communication to research products), but buy over the phone (using another channel of communication to purchase products). However, if a customer contacts a call center after extensive Internet research, for example, to make a final purchase over the telephone, the call center agent has no information about the customer's Internet sessions. That is, agents contacted via one channel may have no way to track a customer's history across another channel. Therefore, agents remain uninformed or depend on the customer to report their history, a slow and unreliable process.